A Ghostly Glow of Light Surrounds The Solar System, And Nobody Can Explain It @TheCosmosNews

#thecosmosnews Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. But how dark is dark? To find out, astronomers decided to sort through 200,000 images from NASA s Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called SKYSURF. This would be any leftover light after subtracting the glow from planets, stars, galaxies, and from dust in the plane of our solar system (called zodiacal light). When researchers completed this inventory, they found an exceedingly tiny excess of light, equivalent to the steady glow of 10 fireflies spread across the entire sky. That s like turning out all the lights in a shuttered room and still finding an eerie glow coming from the walls, ceiling, and floor.